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Forum:Operation Singing Telegram
Jonny Manz has intimated that he wants to contact Equestria Daily and ask them to mention the wiki again. I support that, but we should remember that the operative word is "again". There are a number of possible reasons why the last time only gave us a little bit of a boost, activity-wise: # There is a limited pool of people both able (knowledge-wise) and willing (motivation-wise) to contribute to a Fan labor wiki. # The last mention was very short and buried in a Nightly Roundup. # It was also somewhat misleadingly worded, possibly unintentionally giving people who didn't read the comments the wrong impression. # Equestria Daily doesn't reach the kind of people who would want to contribute. # Our rules are too tough / standards are too high. # Adding content is too difficult. # The wiki back then gave the impression of being unfinished and possibly not worth the effort. # Unregistered users see ads (if they don't have content-blockers installed), and ads drive people away. # There weren't enough incentives to contribute. What can be done about it? # If 1) is true, and it very well might be, there is nothing to do. No amount of promotion will increase traffic and (more importantly) participation, at least not significantly. That's just how it is. # If Petirep read this, he could confirm that there's a world of difference between Nightly Roundups and regular posts in terms of raising awareness. I think it would be wise if Jonny were to try to politely suggest to Sethisto (or whichever one of the other editors replies) to not dump it in the Roundup (if they agree to post it at all, since they can rightly say they've already done so). # Sethisto likes his copypastes. Let's give him one, a brief summary of what the wiki is, who it is for, and what it can do for the fandom. Such a description could also help with 2). # I kind of doubt that, given the size of the site. But still, it can't hurt to also reach out to other news blogs, some of the bigger forums, reddit, and contact the operators of the major fanfic repositories. I don't want to oversell the value a wiki entry has as a promotional tool for writers, and I also don't want writers to primarily use it that way (because that kind of attitude can lead to incomplete, "book blurby" summaries). But I've read several comments now of people saying "I found this story via the Fan Labor Wiki". This is something we can point to as to why it might be a good idea for authors to encourage their fans to come here. # I don't really see how this criticism can possibly be alleviated without compromising the integrity of the site as a proper wiki (as opposed to the kind of weird blog/advertising space/self-esteem-raiser hybrid many other fandom wikis are used as). To be honest, I sometimes think what little we have in the way of restrictions is a little too lax... # We're in the process of working on that, with the Guides/preformatted pages. Those very same steps are also likely to alienate and annoy users who already have problem 5), though, since they're not likely to want to be told what to do. We can only try our best to keep the guides from being too patronising ot too much of a slog to read. # I think we've come quite a long way since then, and that's with only a handful of regular contributors. For comparison, this was all of the content at the time. The new front page should also help. I'm still unhappy about the state of some of the main character articles, though; Rarity and Applejack in particular. # Nothing we can do about that. # I guess we could mention Badges on the Community Corner? We can also add new ones (e.g. "X edits on character pages"), but there's no point in doing the latter until traffic picks up. --Tulipclaymore 19:41, March 17, 2012 (UTC) : Very good points. # If this is true, then, yeah, not a whole lot we can do about this one. # Don't worry, I was planning on (politely, of course) requesting this gets its own post on Eq Daily, rather than a post on a Nightly Roundup. # I'll start working on a summary of what the wiki's about sometime in the next week, since, yeah, Seth does love his copy-paste. # You think I should also try to reach out to FiMfiction, and perhaps the MLP:FiM group on Deviantart? # It can't be helped; but I think that honestly, this one won't hurt us all that much, because I've seen how much people complain about our sister wiki's rules, or the admins themselves, yet that one has a quite active community. # Yeah, I'm sure some will feel patronized by the guides, but I feel, with this one, the pros will outweigh the cons. # Perhaps we could use that as a selling point? Encouraging people to add some fanon about those two main characters in-particular, because, from my experience, there's quite a bit to write about. # Yep, like you said, unless they register or install ad-blockers, nothing we can do about this one. # I'm also coming up with a plan to customize the existing badges we have right now, but yeah, if traffic picks up, perhaps adding more badge tracks will encourage the people to contribute, rather than just browse. : Also, I was thinking in the summary, perhaps we could mention some really popular fan works that have no articles right now (like On a Cross and Arrow), or ones that have articles that are incomplete (like Antipodes; that one in particular might help us too, because the author, PK, is one of the editors at Eq Daily, if I'm not mistaken). -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 23:47, March 18, 2012 (UTC) : I forgot to put this as part of my last reply, but I really think that, if we can just get a few people contributing, perhaps there'll be a domino effect, and it'll attract more people, and so on. And if traffic increases (a sustained increase, of course) we could reenable chat; that's a popular feature on a lot of wikis. -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 04:27, March 19, 2012 (UTC) :: re 4: That would be good. --Tulipclaymore 13:33, March 22, 2012 (UTC)